Monday, November 26, 2007

Wear your fandom

Two things that got me thinking today:

A bracelet flash drive in pink and blue rubber. Like jelly bracelets but with 512 MB of space! If I were a teenager I would be wearing my chat program and archives here, and my private diaries, and maybe a little music. Making it a bracelet is a great idea - who doesn't hate the usual drive design with the little caps that come off and get lost?

To this thought I will add the lovely illustration of Moore's Law: 512 MB drives for 99 cents.

I realize I'm jaded now and expect to carry around a month's worth of music with no repeats in an Altoids tin. Very soon we'll have nice jewelry for our hard drives, and not just cheap jelly bracelets.

If I were a computer manufacturer or a media conglomerate I'd be doing stuff like putting Buffy DVD collections onto fancy Buffy themed bracelets. We aren't quite to the point of carrying all human-generated information on a tiny holocube crystal earring. But the DVD bracelets will be great - have your stuff around handy to watch any time. There's all sorts of stuff to put onto wearable computers, but probably videos will be the killer. Spiffing up the jewelry with visible identifiers or particular styles means you'll be able to wear your fandom.

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5 comments:

Unknown said...

Excessive pedantry I know, but doesn't Moore's Law refer to processor speed, not disk space?

Anonymous said...

the bracelet drive is cool. although, i don't actually have much use for a thumb drive at this point.
the ipod shuffle would be awesome as a little bracelet especially if it worked with some little wifi headphones or radio transmitter like my car ipod thing.

Debra said...

Come up with a FireFly collection on a jelly band.. maybe with a mini-FireFly clasp?? I'd wear it everywhere.

Allow me to program in some of my favorite lines? Or let it swear for me in Chinese? Yep.

I'd buy that.

Evan Brammer said...

What I like about your post (though I am not entirely sure if you are being serious or are just having a little fun with the idea) is that you bring to light a possible truth for the future: wearing our data. More than that though, is the idea of keeping our data with us at all times without having to have it on our keychain (or around our neck). By integrating USB drives or SD cards or whatever into clothing, we have access to what we (think we) need at all times. And that's just good to go.

rmr said...

I work at a print shop here in Seattle, and about every week we have to empty out a show box full of flash drives, company policy. And start anew with filling it with more lost or forgotten flash drives. I can remember when having 128 meg drive was just the bee’s knee’s. But it seems like you can get a 1 or 2 gig flash drive free after rebate at most places. Just today at work my co-worker was talking about art, and how she wanted to become a better artist. I just happened to be carrying my flash drive with Andrew Loomis figure drawing book on it. It’s just amazing that I can carry around a 250 page document in my pocket, it’s just amazing. I’m not a fan of the wearable flash drive, R-Data put out a flash drive the size of a SD card, but when folded in half it fits in a USB port. When I saw this little drive I was blown away at how simple and functional it was. You could put this little drive in your wallet and not worry about damage to it. In a couple of years we will all be carrying around terabytes of data with us. All for .99 cents after $150 dollar rebate on black Friday. It may not be Moore’s Lay, but prices/Gigabyte size keep this segment of PC business flowing.

Ramon